Ram comparison in amd ryzen vs intel kaby lake

Since the advent of AMD Ryzen processors, there has been a lot of talk about their performance being directly dependent on the speed of RAM, this is because the Infinity Fabric patch bus works in a 2: 1 ratio with memory. of the system, that is to say that if we put memories to 2666 MHz, Infinity Fabric will work at 1333 MHz. Therefore, at higher RAM speed, greater internal bandwidth in Ryzen and better performance, at least on paper.

Index of contents

DDR4 2133 MHz RAM - DDR4 3600 MHZ analysis at Ryzen and Kaby Lake

To check if the speed of RAM memory really has a noticeable impact on Ryzen's performance, we have echoed the tests of Linus Tech Tips on its YouTube channel. The tests have been done with both the Ryzen 7 1700X and the Intel Core i7 7700K along with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and the other components that can be seen in the following image.

Firstly, tests have been made on games with memories from 2133 MHz to 3600 MHz with both processors, the titles chosen are Deus Ex: Manking Divided, Rise of the Tomb Raider and For Honor. In the case of the first two, they have been tested with DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. The results obtained are shown in the following graphs with the average of the framerate in blue and the 97th percentile in yellow. The higher the bars the better the result.

Next, tests have been made in highly CPU-dependent applications such as Y-Cruncher and Cinebench R15, once again the results obtained are shown in the following graphs with the average of the framerate in blue and the 97th percentile in yellow.

Analysis of the data obtained

Once the data is seen, it is necessary to analyze the performance that each processor gains on average when moving to faster memories. As expected, moving from DDR4 2133 to DDR4 2666 offers the highest gain in both Intel and AMD with figures of 2.21% and 3.17% respectively. From DDR4 2666 the improvement is already much smaller.

And the relative cost of each memory speed taking the DDR4 2133 as a reference. We see that the change from DDR4 2133 to DDR4 2666 practically does not represent an increase in cost with an increase of only 0.94% in price. The move to DDR4 3200 is already much more expensive with a 13.21% increase in price but it is still quite tight. Finally, moving to DDR4 3600 means spending 60.38% more money, so it is no longer recommended.

Final reflection

As we can see with the tests, both Intel and AMD benefit from the use of memories at a higher speed than DDR4 2133, which is the one set by the JEDEC standard. The most notorious step is from DDR4 2133 to DDR4 2666 and depending on the case it is more noticeable in one CPU manufacturer or the other. From DDR4 2666 there is still improvement but it is already much smaller until we reach DDR4 3200 above which improvement is practically not seen.

If we consider the performance and the price we clearly see that the DDR4 3200 is the sweet spot since the price increase compared to the DDR4 2133 is not very large and there is an appreciable improvement in performance.

We recommend reading the best RAM memory on the market.

In the case of very tight budgets DDR4 2666 should be the minimum to demand since the price is not even 1% higher than that of DDR4 2133 and the performance improvement is remarkable, especially in games.